Over forty years ago, back in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a small town about an hour from Philadelphia, my wife and I bought our first house. We borrowed the $10,000 downpayment from a relative and with great trepidation signed all the necessary documents and prepared to become homeowners.
It was six months after I completed my two-years of service in the Air Force as a psychiatrist and my newly minted private practice was doing well. As an important aside, times were very different back then. A $57,000 house was a lot of money. Now, a starter home can be ten or twenty times that depending on where you live.
Anyway, on moving day, we loaded up our station wagon with our two tiny kids and everything else we could squeeze in the back and drove to the house to wait for the movers. It was a lovely one-story home on a small circle with five other homes.
As we approached the house, the Greenstones, an elderly couple, were parked in the driveway. I parked across the street and watched as they stood side-by-side holding hands and gazing at the home that they had lived in for over forty years. They got in their car, drove about ten feet and then backed up to where they started. Mr. Greenstone got out of the car and walked over to three rosebushes on the side of the driveway that looked like they were falling over. He took some twine and a scissors out of his pocket and spent the next ten minutes making sure that the bushes were straight. He stepped back, admired his work, and then got in the car and drove away.
Why you might ask, would someone care if the rosebushes were falling over in a home that they no longer owned? When you listen to the news, the horrendous lies of our former president, the lies that are supported by millions of Americans and publicly elected officials, the lack of ethics and honor in so many people around the world, why is Smukler obsessing about some silly rosebushes.
I’m obsessing about our loss of ethics, honor, and just doing the kind and right thing. Mr. Greenstone had no idea that we were watching him. He quietly and carefully did what he thought was right. That’s the kind of person I want to be, the kind of people I want to be around, the kind of world I want to leave for my grandkids. There’s nothing wrong in dreaming.
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Inside The Mind of a Psychiatrist 